September 29, 2012

A place to discuss the sports stories that aren't making news, share links that aren't quite front-page material, and diagram plays on your hand. Remember to count to five Mississippi before commenting in anger.

I'm pretty sure that TEX/OAK and BAL/NYY would have to play a one-game playoff to determine the AL West and AL East division winners, and the losers would then be the wild card teams.
Those wild card teams would then have to play one game against each other, with the winner going to the ALDS (against the #1 seed).
As well, Chicago/Detroit will have to play a one-game playoff to determine the AL Central winner, and the loser goes home.

This could lead a team playing on the road on Wednesday (game 162), travelling to a new location on Thursday (division/wc determination game), travelling to a new location on Friday (wc play-in game), getting one day off (Saturday) and then playing at home on Sunday. Four different teams, in four different cities, in five days.

First, nothing in the AL Central matters beyond the AL Central, so that we can disregard.

Second, unless they were complete idiots (always possible with the MLB front office), they should have rules in place for tiebreakers. Haven't we seen this come up in the past? In cases where two teams tie for a division lead, if a tiebreaker rule (such as heads-up record, or intra-division record) can be used to decide the division winner and the "loser" still makes the playoffs... they'll just go with that, right, and avoid a playoff game to decide the division?

Amazingly, BAL/NYY have split the season 9-9, so they'd have to go to intra-division record which leans heavily to BAL. Surprisingly, OAK/TEX are also tied in the season series right now with an 8-8 record... but with three games left against each other someone has to win outright.

The first order of business is always to decide the division winner; of those left we'd suss out the wildcard. The only way we'd have a 1-game playoff for the division in either the East or West is if your clusterf*ck of a 5-way tie comes to pass (with Texas winning the West and everyone else at 91-wins). Then you have 5 teams vying for 3 spots: AL East, and two wild cards.

The odds against this are extraordinarily long; it starts by presuming that NYY and BAL go 0-4, OAK only wins 1 game, TB wins its remaining games, and LAA goes 4-1 exactly. It'd certainly be interesting, but I'm betting by even mid-day on Sunday we've seen at least one final score that has closed most those branches of possibility. I just checked the count, and there are 18 games left of importance to the AL East and AL West, which means there are 2^18 (262,144) possible outcomes of all these games, of which very very few (20?) lead to a 5-way tie with TEX winning the West. That list:

Day 0: LAA/TEX (makeup game from today, in doubleheader)

Day 1: NYY/TOR, BOS/BAL, TB/CHW, LAA/TEX, SEA/OAK

Days 2-4: BOS/NYY, BAL/TB, TEX/OAK, LAA/SEA

It could happen, but the computation would be pointless until we at least see tomorrow's scores: like I said, the odds are strong that by mid-day tomorrow a lot of clarity has been reached. Because if TB and LAA flinch, then they're out of the hunt: you'd be left with four teams to fill 4 playoff spots in two division winners and two wild card teams. And they only would need 1-game playoffs at all if they all tie for the same record; but even then, they could use the heads-up or intra-division standings as an instant tiebreaker.

Which incidentally is why this two-team, one-game-playoff WC is such a shitty idea: not only is it making the playoff picture much harder to understand, and tiebreakers much more likely to be invoked... but it's removed a lot of the drama (BOS/TB would have had no tension last year, since the last few games- even with Boston's epic slide- would always have meant the two teams were going to have a one-game playoff anyway), and unfairly penalizes the Wild Card team because they may have as good a record as two other division winners but have to put their entire season on the line in one game, wasting their best starter. The single WC entrant meant the two best teams were in the playoffs from each league; a second WC entrant is just bullshit all around.

Second, unless they were complete idiots (always possible with the MLB front office), they should have rules in place for tiebreakers. Haven't we seen this come up in the past? In cases where two teams tie for a division lead, if a tiebreaker rule (such as heads-up record, or intra-division record) can be used to decide the division winner and the "loser" still makes the playoffs... they'll just go with that, right, and avoid a playoff game to decide the division?

I'm pretty sure because the Wild Cards have to participate in a "play-in" game that they won't be using tie-breakers to decide who gets the division title if there is a tie. They'll have to play a game to decide the division winners, and the losers go into the wild-card play-in game.

MLB doesn't recognize the WC play-in game as a true "playoff" game, so they won't assign someone that spot by tie-breaker only.